Not Too Much

There's not too much going on around here. I thought I was going to spend this week temping, but they cancelled on me.

I'm starting to remember how to be unemployed and do nothing all day long. The key is really not going to bed too early. I have a much easier time entertaining myself sleeping through half of the work-day and then being awake late into the night.

Last night an old friend called and we spent a couple of hours on the telephone. He's developed an otherwise distressing memory problem (I don't mean to make light of this, except for that I am), but since I love to remember things (you'd never believe the capacity I have for remembering absolutely everything except for images) and I also love to tell boring stories over and over again; in the context of our friendship this works out pretty well. I get to tell all my stories featuring him to him, and he's terribly interested in all the extra detail and backstory that characterizes a story as told by me. Plus, this means I always get to be right about any discrepencies regarding "what happened" without having to enter a short, complicated argument in which I'm the only person who actually cares.

This lead to the strangest dream I've had in a long time.

I'll give you the gist, because the actual nuts and bolts of the dream delve a little more deeply into the nature of that friend and our friendship than he or I probably want me talking about with "most of the people I know and lots of people that I don't" on the internet.

He was on Oprah, and he made me come along with him as the "you and a guest" part of the trip. I was sitting backstage, I don't know why I wasn't in the audience, but I was backstage. He was asked something about himself and he was like "I don't know. Mary would know. She's good at this stuff." and the next thing I knew I was on stage. The show quickly turned into a program about us talking to one another (which is how things usually go when we're in a group of any sort, it quickly becomes a show of us talking with each other).

So, yeah I had this whole dream that was mostly us talking to each other on Oprah. We've made a game and an art form out of the way we communicate with eachother and when we're both on, there's little that can entertain me more. We did our little verbal game of chess; we've tested each other and we're equally matched (not literally so though, he kicks my ass in chess, and I his in Trivial Pursuit. We're actually evenly matched at euchre, Scrabble and Connect Four.)

Neither of us could possibly win a war of endurance, although sometimes we both like to try. So, we go and push and pull and debate and then finally one of us manages to "win" and the other one says "okay, fair enough", and we start on the next thing. And that's what we did on Oprah, and we were talking about each other (he's almost as self-absorbed as I am).

And then (this is where it gets extra weird) he proposed to me. It was completely unexpected, and in my dream we weren't dating or anything. I can't remember how it went down exactly, but he tried to put together an argument for us getting married and I refuted it for awhile, but I was much less prepared to defend my position than he was to present his. I found some fault that he couldn't deny in whatever he said when he asked me to marry him and that gave me some leverage. Then I declared that I was going to need time to think about this, but he wasn't willing to accept that, and then finally we both agreed that I could have twelve hours to develop some thoughts on the matter and we would need at least three hours to discuss it, so Oprah went to commercial and when we came back, she was still a little confused by the whole thing, but then we just changed the subject and moved on with the "interview".

Feel free to comment on that one all you want. I think it's really strange.